ABSTRACT
The analysis of self-assembling dispersions such as micelles, vesicles, and microemulsions is more complex than the study of dispersions of rigid colloidal particles. The interfacial models assume that the strong correlations needed to self-assemble the surfactant molecules at the internal water-oil interfaces are always present. Unilamellar vesicles consist of a surfactant bilayer that separates an inner region of a fluid from a continuous phase of the same fluid. The physical origin of the instability of the vesicle to the flat bilayer is the frustration of the curvature energy in the spherical state; the inner layer is frustrated and vice versa. The chapter focuses on the self-assembly of the systems and on the problems of the sizes and shapes of the aggregates. While molecules that prefer spherical aggregates are constrained by geometrical packing to assemble into micelles with a fixed value of N ≈ M, amphiphiles which prefer cylindrical aggregates show a broad distribution of sizes.
